U of T team awarded major funding for greenhouse gas project

Professor Geoffrey Ozin and his team are working to mitigate climate change by transforming waste products into valuable commodities and industrial feedstocks (photo by Camilla Pucholt)

Researcher Geoff Ozin and the Solar Fuels Team at the University of Toronto have been awarded close to $1 million from the Low Carbon Innovation Fund (LCIF) to translate their greenhouse gas research to scale.

Reza Moridi, Ontario’s minister of research, innovation and science, made the announcement last week at the Ontario Centres of Excellence Discovery conference.

Ozin and his team are working to mitigate climate change by transforming waste products into valuable commodities and industrial feedstocks. He calls this technology G2F, or Greenhouse Gases to Fuels.

“Hydrocarbons from fossil fuels remain major feedstocks in the manufacture of a variety of crucial chemicals, polymers, pharmaceuticals and materials, and therefore cannot be replaced easily,” says Ozin, a professor in U of T’s department of chemistry.

"In this project, we propose a technology capable of recycling CO2, either from the atmosphere or from concentrated industrial sources, into value-added chemicals and fuels.”

Moridi says that LCIF initiatives like Ozin’s, “will help us fight climate change while preparing industries to thrive in a competitive, low-carbon economy.”

Ozin says he is excited to begin work on the Greenhouse Gases to Fuels project. “Working with the Low Carbon Innovation Fund, we intend to demonstrate that our G2F technology is an effective approach to making Ontario both environmentally sustainable and economically successful,” he says.